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This theoretical paper aims to draw on existing literature to examine the case for libraries to play a key role in the democratization of Oman. This paper is intended to provide foundation for further empirical research to develop a proposed future strategy for Oman’s library sector that will help facilitate the future political and economic transition of the Sultanate.

This is a theoretical study that draws on existing literature to examine the case for libraries to play a key role in the democratization of Oman.

There are four main ways in which public libraries support democratization are identified and discussed: providing access to information, ensuring inclusivity of knowledge, forming a community hub for interaction and dialogue and promoting social inclusion through internet access.

As Oman undergoes political and economic transition, this study and the follow-on empirical research will be highly significant in ensuring that the expansion of democratic processes in Oman proceeds peacefully and that the Sultanate provides a best practice model for Islamic democracy within the Gulf Cooperation Council region and globally.

After direct elections were instituted in Hong Kong and the sovereignty was transferred from Britain to China, politicization inevitably followed democratization. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the pro-democratic political parties’ politics in Hong Kong in recent history.

The research was conducted through a historical comparative analysis, within the context of Hong Kong after the sovereignty handover and the interim period of crucial democratization.

With the implementation of “One country, Two systems,” political democratization was hindered in Hong Kong’s transformation. The democratic forces have no alternative but to seek more radicalized politics, which has caused a decisive and ineluctable fragmentation of the local political parties.

This paper explores and evaluates the political history of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region under “One country, Two systems” and the ways in which the limited democratization hinders the progress of Hong Kong’s transformation.

The purpose of the paper is to model the human development potentials of democratization, demilitarization, industrialization, and family planning that different developing regions tap and forego.

The authors develop and estimate a human development system that is built around economic, political, and social dimensions and program a system dynamic model to simulate the effects of democratization, demilitarization, industrialization, and family planning.

The findings strongly indicate that the socioeconomic and political development effects associated with industrial development and family planning far outweigh those associated with democratization and demilitarization.

With this study the authors hope to stimulate a discussion with the goal of achieving a better understanding of the economic and political transmission mechanisms of democratization, demilitarization, industrialization, and family planning. To the authors' knowledge, this study is the first to assess these developmental parameters quantitatively in a comparative economic perspective.

Here, we examine the challenges to democratization in Bahrain, with a particular focus on how the recent 2011 Uprising has resulted in a deepening of authoritarianism. It is argued that the recent unrest has brought into sharp relief the absence of “quality” democracy in Bahrain, and that any form of democratic transition is dependent on the will of a conservative Al Khalifa-Saudi nexus. While the pro-democracy movement may have prompted minor concessions on the part of the government, the extent of the popular mobilization triggered the Al Khalifa regime’s authoritarian reflex, and they have reacted to throttle the Uprising by putting in place legislative, ideological, and political barriers to reform, which points not only to a current de-democratization, but also a lack of future democratization. In addition to arguing for the post-2011 undoing of democracy in Bahrain, this paper also points to two major barriers to future democratization; (1) a conservative, post-Independence Al Khalifa-Saudi coalition assisted by large military resources (2) protracted communal tension brought about by the government’s instrumentalization of sectarianism.

This chapter explores the relationship between bureaucracy and the ­democratization of the Republic of Korea by analyzing the roles and responsibilities of the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea (BAI) and how Korea’s unique type of supreme audit institution (SAI) have been involved throughout the democratization process of Korea over the last two decades. Unlike western supreme audit institutions which mainly functioned for financial and performance auditing, Korea’s SAI, BAI bureaucracy, has functioned to reduce corruption, in cooperation with citizen’s participation which gives unique cases for the context of developing countries. The most important finding of this study is that bureaucracy can be an effective vehicle in a country’s political trajectory towards democratization given that the public institutions and agencies have specific traits such as having clear and comprehensive mandates, retaining high ­sensitivity to external needs, and maintaining well-qualified staff with active utilization of Information Technology. The main targets of the analysis are the conditions under which BAI bureaucracy could effectively exert its mandates and successfully fulfill its duties; also the question of how the BAI bureaucracy has facilitated democratization as being the locus of participatory democracy will be addressed.

In 2004 a military agreement between the US and the Paraguayan government with the objective of strengthening the democratization process in this South American country came into effect. With immunity granted to the American forces, both armed forces carried out humanitarian operations and joint exercises. These joint exercises were principally concerned with combating local insurgent and terrorist groups. Paraguay's geo-political position in South America with its important natural resources and the existence of strong social movements in the country leave the observer to doubt the underlying reasons and hence the positive effects of democratization in the face of the disputable practices of the military. This article analyzes the short-term impact on civil society.

It is commonly recognized that the transition to democracy in Korea was associated with economic progress. However, not many scholars have given attention to the role of bureaucracy during the process of democratization, due to the fact that bureaucracy is usually thought of as belonging to politics, not democracy. As a refutation of this general view, first, this chapter argues that bureaucracy has been an important contributor to political modernization. Since the post-1945 period, the ‘ceiling’ strategy, which limits the total number of civil servants, was introduced into the personnel management method and system of checks and balances to limit undue political influence over staffing and to control bureaucratic expansion. Second, through this strategy as policy, the bureaucracy legitimately tried to avoid undemocratic political power by standardized process and allow coordination. The ceiling policy is originally the product of historical context during colonial and authoritarian period, but the bureaucracy utilizes it as the instrument to reduce corruption. The contribution of this chapter is provoking the new insights about democratization from bureaucrat’s perspective which is rarely highlighted.